


all things to all people all of the time

by dirgewithoutmusic



Series: bringing the war home [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers - Freeform, Brainwashed Assassins, Gen, Iron Man 2, Mentions of Canonical Abuse, SHIELD falls, Unreliable Narrator, captain america 2, induced amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1524314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier did not waste bullets, time, or death. Natasha told herself that and fingered her scar.</p><p>The Winter Soldier did not leave witnesses, but he had left her by that cliff outside of Odessa. Was Natasha an exception? Or did she not count as a witness? Had he looked at her and seen the same black button eyes reflected back at him, the on/off switch, the tick of clockwork?</p><p>Years later, Natasha watched the Soldier slam into the freeway concrete. The bullet holes in her abdomen had healed, and she knew this thing did not consider itself a person.</p><p>They were animate objects, both of them, useless in the witness stand. He hadn’t pulled the car transmission out, after all, hadn’t stripped the cell phone in the victim’s pocket, or shot up the rocks at the side of that road outside Odessa. He hadn’t shot her. He had left her there, breathing, and the Winter Soldier didn’t leave witnesses.</p><p>On cold nights, Natasha dreamed of ballerinas: porcelain, exquisite, their ribs jutting out stark under their skin.</p><p>(A Natasha Romanoff character focus)</p>
            </blockquote>





	all things to all people all of the time

**Author's Note:**

> This is all doctorcakeray's fault. Everything. Always. Doc, apologize. Doc, accept your thank you's. 
> 
> As well as holding my hand through this and providing context, research, and copious noises, Doc also titled the series.

The Winter Soldier did not waste bullets, time, or death. Natasha told herself that and fingered her scar.

The Winter Soldier did not leave witnesses, but he had left her by that cliff outside of Odessa. Was Natasha an exception? Or did she not count as a witness? Had he looked at her and seen the same black button eyes reflected back at him, the on/off switch, the tick of clockwork?

Years later, Natasha watched the Soldier slam into the freeway concrete. The bullet holes in her abdomen had healed, and she knew this thing did not consider itself a person.

They were animate objects, both of them, useless in the witness stand. He hadn’t pulled the car transmission out, after all, hadn’t stripped the cell phone in the victim’s pocket, or shot up the rocks at the side of that road outside Odessa. He hadn’t shot her. He had left her there, breathing, and the Winter Soldier didn’t leave witnesses.

On cold nights, Natasha dreamed of ballerinas: porcelain, exquisite, their ribs jutting out stark under their skin.

 

Natasha was deep in her element when Coulson called her mark’s cell in an abandoned train station. This was the closest she had to a mother tongue, both the Russian and the way the smugglers’ sentences curled like threats and punched like bloody promises. She knew the weight of the chair she was tied to and how much force it would take to splinter it on the concrete.

“Barton’s been compromised,” Coulson said in her ear and she put him on hold.

When she got back to base, Natasha got the situation report and a packed travel bag from Coulson. On a SHIELD jet headed to Calcutta, she watched the footage of Loki’s arrival and the subsequent theft of the cube, of a scientist, and of one of SHIELD’s best snipers.

 _Clint Barton has heart._  Loki had snapped Clint up like he was a toy rifle on a shelf.

“See,” Natasha whispered to no one. “I told you that thing would get you in trouble someday.”

Clint shot Fury in the bowels of a SHIELD base and Natasha sat stock still in front of the video screen. This was her brother shooting her father. This was a good man shooting a good man.

This was Hawkeye, who never missed, aiming at close range to incapacitate a dangerous man and only clipping him in the shoulder.

Natasha closed the video screen and curled up in her flight chair to sleep. They would land in Calcutta in three hours and she had work to do. 

During the Chitauri Incident, it was not lost on Natasha that perhaps her biggest relationship was with the Hulk. Bruce Banner taunted her in Calcutta, where she was the face of every cage door he felt slamming shut around him— trapped under rubble beside him, she begged him not to shift, swore to him on her life that she would get him out of there, and the Hulk roared that her life was not enough-- on a New York street Banner apologized for his monster and Natasha told him they could use his help.

In the end, they towered over a fallen godling together. He was always angry and she was always lost, but here they stood. What does that say?

"So Fury isn't after the monster?" Bruce Banner asked her in a shack just outside Calcutta.

"Not that he's told me," Natasha said, ready, ready to grab her gun. She wondered if this was what people felt like around her.  _Will they get the monster or the man?_

_I'm a spy not a soldier, not a monster, not your friend. I am a series of truthful lies._

Strip Bruce down to his core and he was rage, green and blinding—so maybe it was jealousy, then, maybe that was at the heart of his anger. Maybe Natasha knew what that was like, looking at people who had all the things you couldn't have—eight hours of sleep, memories you could trust, a language that felt like your native tongue.

Did the Hulk terrify Natasha because he was unmade, all her worst demons living outside her skin? Or was it because he was more than Bruce—he was not unmade, he was made, constructed, built.

She looked at the building blocks of this monster and felt her own arms, fingers searching for stitch marks, weldings, clinical scars.

Natasha knew what it was to be unmade, so maybe this was the story of her making.

 

Natasha was trained to be a ghost, a poltergeist, leaving quiet death in her wake. Clint was trained sporadically, accidentally—his father taught him how to bruise. The carnies taught him to shoot, to pay attention to the crowds, to see whether they were an audience or a mob tonight. They taught him that when you run away, when you fall, sometimes people catch you.

Clint liked heights, liked wide clear sight lines. It was his eyes Loki had taken. 

“The mindless beast who makes play he’s still a man,” Loki said of Bruce Banner, but he was looking out the feed straight at Natasha when he said it. All she could think was  _Clint_. All she could think was  _me_.

When she told Loki she had red in her ledger, she meant that she owed Clint Barton a debt. When Loki spat those words back at her, he was talking about her sins, not other peoples' unasked-for mercies.

Loki was good, Natasha had to admit. The three sins he had dragged up and spat at her--Drakov's daughter, Sao Paolo, the hospital fire--weren't the ones someone with full access to her history would have chosen to make her squirm. They weren't her highest death tolls, though the hospital fire was close, but they hit hard and hit deep.

 _Truthful lies_ , she thought, and let him see he had wounded her, let him see her weak. Loki would never break under pressure, not in her lifetime, not this proud, arrogant godling.

But give him space to gloat and he would barely stop to catch his breath.

Natasha found out that the Hulk was Loki's play, but it hardly helped. The first engine exploded. Blasted through the lab window, Banner groaned in pain, greened in agony, and Natasha tried to calm him down.

“I swear on my life I will get you out of here.”

“YOUR LIFE?” Banner roared and broke.

 

Two years from that terrible day—from this fiery ship in the sky, the monster on her heels, the portal screaming open over the New York skyline—Nick Fury would say in a dam in DC, “I did what I did to protect people.”

Natasha wanted so badly for that to be something she could say and not be lying at all.

 

Bruised and shaking from the Hulk, Natasha pushed herself to her feet and went to meet Clint in the bowels of the helicarrier. The radio had crackled and clamored— _does anyone copy_? And she hadn’t wanted to answer. But if this was anyone’s job, it was hers.

Natasha had been there, once, behind eyes not as blue but just as vacant. Now, she was the one in the SHIELD uniform and Clint was right, it was only a carnie outfit.

_And for our next circus act, the Black Widow will transform into anything you like._

_A friend, Steve? You want someone to remind you you’re a monster, Dr. Banner?_

_You want a haughty secretary, Tony? Anything else, Mr. Stark? You do like them untouchable, don’t you, two steps ahead of you and already gone._

_A mewling quim, a weeping lover, Mr. Loki? Here you go, I hope you choke on it._

She wasn’t sure what Clint had asked her to be. Maybe he hadn’t.

_What do you want, Clint? Agent Barton, Hawkeye, carnie’s kid? You take your coffee black. You made me watch Mulan in a cruddy London apartment after a mission and laughed every time the horse did anything at all. You prefer arrows to bullets and I’ve never understood why—they’re just as lethal. I think maybe it’s the versatility of the trick ones they give you; or maybe it’s the showmanship—old habits die hard._

_You have heart, but what do you want?_

_You want me to stop you. You want me to destroy you._

_Well, tough luck, kid. I wanted that, too, once and you wouldn’t give it to me._

Now, Natasha was the one in the SHIELD uniform and he was the killer staring back at her with vacant eyes. And Clint was wrong. It didn’t feel like a carnie costume, this uniform, this agent before her name. Natasha felt responsible.

She owed him a debt. She owed him a life.

Natasha was on the other side of this finally. She had the uniform, the clear eyes, someone to save instead of to kill. (She had a cracked rib, a sprained ankle, bruises all up and down her side, panic shoving adrenalin through her veins).

Natasha looked at Clint’s sightless eyes and felt sick, felt sick, felt sick.

She raised her fists.

 

Many things had made her hesitate over the years.

It had been a daughter in taffeta with sticky fingers, clammering to be dropped off at ballet lessons. It had been an ink stain on his left hand. It had been a trick.

It had been a flash of reflected light on the skyline, but instead of dropping for a sniper she paused; suddenly she felt like she  _owed_ , she felt like she’d  _lost_.

Natasha hesitated, but she always finished the mission. 

 

“You don't understand," said Clint in a small locked room on the helicarrier. "Have you ever had someone take your brain out and play? Take you out and stuff something else in? You know what it's like to be unmade?”

“You know that I do.”

 

By the time the helicarrier had turned towards New York City, Steve trusted Natasha enough that a nod from her was all he needed to vouch for Clint.

This did not surprise her. People were always quick to trust her competence, her good eyes, her swift hands. It was her heart they doubted. She had worked under Fury for six years, trying to scrub herself clean, and yet in a dam in DC he said, "I wasn't sure who I could trust."

She hadn't known she wanted that. She had thought it was enough to have their professional respect.

When Fury was wounded, he called Maria Hill. When he was wounded, he went to Steve Rogers. Natasha had stood outside his surgery room and watched Nick Fury die behind a sheet of glass because he hadn't been sure she wasn't one of the ones trying to kill him.

In Sam's back bedroom, Natasha asked Steve Rogers if he would trust her to save his life. He said, "I would now," and she wondered what she had been doing for the last six years other than saving lives. She wondered what it was that made people doubt her heart.

"Don't do this to me Nick," Natasha would whisper at what she thought was Fury's deathbed. "Don't do this to me, Nick," she whispered, but he did. He probably didn't even know it was going to touch her, this frozen vigil, this death. Nothing touched the Black Widow. Natasha was comfortable with everything.

She stood over his body in the morgue, one shaking hand on his head. Maria Hill sent Steve in to take her away, because they needed to move the body. People who had more right to mourn here, people who were trusted, they needed to move the body.  
Natasha moved directly to questioning Steve in the hospital hallway.

Maybe that was part of it—the way she could switch, turn her grief off in exchange for a driving need to know. But this was her grieving. She wanted to know why Nick had died. What had he died for? Why had he gone to Rogers and not to her? What was it about Rogers that made him trustworthy and made her only useful?

 

Three days after New York Natasha let herself into Clint’s apartment with a key he hadn’t given her but knew she had. He was on a battered couch with a steaming pot of coffee and an open laptop on the low table in front of him. Clint was all bristles and raised haunches, barely sparing her a glance.

She sat down next to him and he didn’t shift. On the screen, a Hawkeye with shining blue eyes drew back his bow. She reached out and hit the spacebar to pause it.

“Hey!”

“Don't do that to yourself, Clint.”

“You've seen every speck of footage, I know you have, Nat.” He moved to restart it, but she snatched it away, closed it neatly and slid it under the couch. Clint glared. “How come you get to? How come it's okay for you to beat yourself up over every kill, but I need to be wrapped in cotton?”

“Because it wasn't a month of my body being compromised,” said Natasha. “That was my childhood, my adolescence, my coming of age. That’s where I came from and I need to know it to know—me.”

“That was never you, Nat.” All the fight had gone out of him. For a moment it looked too much like the way his guard had crumpled after Loki tapped that devil's scepter against his chest. Natasha felt powerful, damaged, and dirty, to be able to cut through Clint's defenses as easy as the god of mischief's toy.

“Really?” she said, dropping every bit of scorn she could into that word. “Then who did you see in me, that day? Who did you save?”

“I didn’t save anyone,” said Clint. “I just didn't pull the trigger.”

“And that's why my old crimes are mine to watch, and why you don't deserve to watch Loki kill people with your hands,” she said. 

 

It had been in Stalingrad, a Thursday, the sky charcoal grey above the old cement apartments—or had it been Paris, a mischievous southern wind circling the alleyways, her sights on a portly diplomat sitting down for a morning croissant—

Natasha knew this: by the end of the day it had started raining. She knew his scope had flashed on a roof and she had seen him—

What roof? 1950s-style Soviet housing? Red tile roofs in a little resort town ten miles east of Delphi? A modern monstrosity in Chicago?

Did it matter?

She had seen his eyes.

It was the first time anyone had looked at her in years.

She had detoxed for weeks—there had been drugs for strength, for speed, and her body ached for them. But the things they put her brain on—to muddle, to meddle, to _aim_ her—those her body thirsted for too.

She shook for days in the little off-grid apartment Clint had taken her to. When she’d come down off the worst of it, he contacted his panicking handlers and brought her in.

She had been a newer weapon than her Red Room masters' antiques, so they had been subtler in their techniques. They had been kinder, some might say. They had left her whole and relatively sane, just malleable.

They had left her whole enough that when she saw blood on her hands she knew she had spilt it, even when they took _who_ and  _how_ and  _why_. They had left her sane enough to know what guilt tasted like.

Natasha is the diminutive form of Natalia. Natasha is a child's name, a nickname, the easy slip of the tongue between friends. In a locked room in SHIELD, newly caught, newly recruited, she wrote down _Natasha_ and she was never sure why.

 

While Natasha was babysitting a dying Tony Stark, Clint had been on assignment in New Mexico. They had called up on burner phones. He had told her about a sharp-tongue young intern Natasha thought she would have rather appreciated, about the shaggy blond doofus at the center of the ruckus.

"There I was," said Clint. "Sitting in the rain with him in my sights. I told Coulson if he didn't give the command soon we were going to have a problem. I was starting to root for him."

"A new stray puppy," Nat drawled, thumbing through Stark's schedule on her phone.

“I don't collect stray puppies,” Clint protested.

“You are a stray puppy,” she told him haughtily and poured herself some more coffee.

(Because he was, because she was, because they were all saving each other).

That hadn’t been her favorite mission. Pepper hadn’t liked her at first and Natasha hadn’t blamed her. She had been filling the shoes Pepper had still been accepting that she had left behind. 

And Pepper paid more attention to people than Tony ever had—you didn't make it to be CEO of one of the richest tech companies on Earth by not paying attention to people, unless you were Tony Stark and it was your birthright.

Pepper paid attention to people; Natasha was a very good liar, but part of that was always dropping a bit of truth.

Natasha told Bruce Banner that they started her young, so that he might trust her, might understand that she knew the inside of cages as intimately as he did.

She told Loki she had red in her ledger and that she owed Clint Barton, that she didn't weep over the fall of regimes, so that he might think she was a selfish pragmatist, malleable along her single weak side, so he wouldn’t realize that when she said she was ambivalent to regimes she meant that she would fight tooth and nail to save  _people_. SHIELD could fall, HYDRA could fall, any empire, any acronym, but she would die before she let Loki touch humanity.

She had let Pepper see she was hiding something, an ambition, an interest in Tony, so that Miss Potts would simply side-eye a shallow status-climber and not look any further.

But, in the end, they were on better terms. Pepper liked Natasha better with the honesty of her weapons hanging at her waist, and Natasha had always liked her. They kept up a correspondence, and had coffee when they were in the same state.

“You collecting strays, too, now?” Clint asked her cheerily.

“Assets,” she said coolly. “I maintain assets.  _You_  bring puppies home. Pepper's a very competent businesswoman. She doesn't need anyone taking her in out of the cold.”

“You just dropped off a care package filled with snacks and gloves at the post office, Nat,” Clint pointed out.

“She forgets to eat in the middle of the day,” Natasha said irritably. “And the winters get cold.”

Clint laughed.

“You're lucky I didn't bring Stark home,” she told him. “He makes the two of us look well-adjusted.” 

Natasha lied all the time. She told Hawkeye  _I've been compromised_  and meant  _Loki touched you and if I can I will kill him for it_.

Pepper Potts paid attention to people, but Tony Stark looked right past them more days than not. Once, Natasha had thought it might be nice, to not always have your eyes wide open. She’d grown up, since then. She knew a death wish when she saw one.

 

After the Chitauri Incident, Natasha was folded back into SHIELD. Steve Rogers finally signed on for good. With Clint on some odd mix of probation and medical leave, they started sending Natasha out with Captain America.

Steve tried to look at people, but so often he just looked through them. He tried, certainly. He knew Lillian in Accounting had a lip piercing, but there was a difference between cataloguing data and really meeting someone’s eyes, dialing back your thousand-yard stare to look the few feet over to a civilian's soft features.

Natasha had once supposed it must be nice, to be strong enough to know you could walk into chaos and walk back out again only bruised. Natasha had ghosts clogging up her vision, too, but she didn’t have Steve’s option to close her eyes and plow through. She had to keep them wide-open, fixed on threat assessment, measuring up Steve’s assets, Rumlowe’s weaknesses, the exits in every room she entered.

Natasha watched Steve strip off his helmet, charge into fights headlong, eyes wide open, and reassessed.

It was not about selfishness—even Natasha, well versed in the vagaries of human nature, couldn't spend thirty seconds with Captain America and think that the boy had a selfish bone in his body.

What Steve had were the ghosts of broken bones, scars that had been torn from him and never given back. What he had was other peoples' deaths weighing on his shoulders—Peggy's dementia and Jacques's cancer, Howard's car crash and Bucky's fall. All of them lived and died, over and over again, in the unbreakable body of Steve Rogers.

Natasha didn't know the names of her ghosts, only that she had them.

Steve jumped out of a plane without a parachute and landed safely. Bucky died in front of his eyes again and again. No wonder he looked right past everything he saw.

On Tony it was selfishness, in its way, or self-destructiveness. It made them good head-butting partners, actually, Natasha thought. She had been looking forward for weeks to putting Tony and Steve in the same room and watching sparks fly. When they had met on the helicarrier, they hadn't disappointed.

Tony couldn't step past the gilded photos scattered around his childhood, couldn't swallow down his desperate need to shun and impress in equal measure. Steve was clogged with ghosts: Howard's eyes set over Tony's best sneer, Peggy's goodness and bravery trapped in a crumbling mind while this spoiled ass trotted out his easy brilliance on self-centered parade. Natasha had read Steve's file and she thought she could place the name of a Howling Commando behind every stiffening and snarl Steve gave.

So maybe "looking forward" was a little flippant. Maybe what Natasha'd been hoping for was that throwing these two stubborn men together might force each of them to wake up.

 

On battlefields, Steve had clearer sight. 

Steve looked at Natasha accusingly, chewed her out in ship control rooms for endangering lives for the sake of data.

The next day, Fury would tell him  _Natasha is comfortable with everything_ , but for now Steve was looking at her like she ought to discriminate, she ought to be uncomfortable. Steve looked at her like she was made of sinew and blood, not well-oiled Soviet toy-making.

He was looking at her.

Steve stared at the Winter Soldier like he was a person. He gaped, wounded, choked out a name like it was strangling him, like he never wanted it to stop, like the lack of oxygen, the lights going dark was a boon.

 

Natasha realized that she did not look at people either. She looked at targets.

_What do you want? Where do you break?_

_Who do you want me to be?_

 

"Why do you care?" asked Clint, a year after New York. It was not a judgment. That would not be his style. It was an observation from on-high, trying to get down to the core of the patterns he was seeing. A door opens from both sides.

"Who said I care?" said Natasha. She was on an evening stakeout, high on a cement roof with a telecopic lens. She'd hooked her earpiece into Clint's feed; it was daylight where he was and she was bored.

"You're trying to figure out Captain Rogers. You're sitting down to coffee with his in-house watcher to see if you can suss out his bad dreams."

"Him being broken could get us both killed on some dark night. Just trying to anticipate where the breaks are. And Sharon’s nice."

"Uh huh." There was a sharp crack and then a scuffle.

"Clint?"

"Gimme a moment," he grunted.

"I thought Fury put you on a low conflict mission. Just sandy beaches and surveillance."

"He miscalculated. He does that sometimes." There was another scuffle and then Clint said, "You used to do that with me, you know."

"What?"

"Call it anticipating breaks."

 

A few days before SHIELD fell, Nick Fury was shot three times through the chest with unrifled Soviet slugs.

Natasha watched Nick Fury die ten feet from her, behind a wall of clear glass, and thought at herself, _you fool, you fool, I told you that stupid thing would get you in trouble someday._

Soviet slugs—she knew these like a childhood toy, like a Christmas bauble. It was something she would have in common with Sharon Carter, growing up with more bullets in her hands than marbles.

But where Sharon was raised up in defense and fed stories of heroes and defiance, destruction was Natasha’s nursery rhyme.

Yet they both would end up here, in the rubble of the Triskelion, Sharon’s world and Natasha’s latest carnie uniform burning and crumbling around them. What did that say?

 

Standing in the birthplace of Captain America, the birthplace of SHIELD, all the things she wanted to be, Natasha learned that her rebirth was as much a lie as her past.

She was supposed to be the cynic. She was supposed to be the dark heart. She wasn’t supposed to believe in heroes. 

“SHIELD would have stopped you,” said Natasha like a child’s prayer.

Zola laughed. 

And that was the story, wasn't it? Natasha was a prop, a pair of guns, a sly smile. It was about everyone but her—she brought people together, she tore them apart, she left them bloodied on the asphalt. She was the witness, the wind-up toy, the understudy ready to slip into whatever role was needed.

Except she couldn't be the witness, could she? The Winter Soldier had looked right through her, hadn't deigned to pull the trigger.

Clint hadn't pulled the trigger.

Natasha had pulled the trigger over and over again, had filled up her ledger with red. She had joined SHIELD to clean up, to be a white hat for once, to scrub her old life from her skin.

It was funny, in the ways tragedies are when they get to be too much. She had traded the KGB and its ugly inheritors in for HYDRA. Instead of having a bloody shadow, she had become one. 

 

Natasha was not meant to be an Avenger. She had been meant to be their handler, maybe their shadow some days too.

 _Avenger_  was a name for a hero—for a supersoldier, an Ironman, a Hulk, and a god.

But the day the Chitauri struck, Natasha sat down beside Clint. "We have to stop him," she told him. “Whoever’s left."

That choice was something she'd never be able to wipe from her ledger. 

 

High in the Triskelion, Natasha’s fingers hesitated over the keyboard. 

She had hesitated for years, over children and distractions, half-remembered dreams of the past—but here she was, stuck in a frozen half-breath, hesitating because she was deciding who she wanted to be. 

“Are you sure you’re ready for the world to see you as you really are?”

Pierce thought he knew what that meant:  _who she really was_. He thought he understood her, the marionette, the ballerina, the cat that the carnie and his trick shots pulled in out of the cold. 

She was compromised. She was complicit. She had burned a hundred things down and covered a hundred things up for this agency.

This wasn't about her. This wasn't about what she was ready for. This was about what the people hurt by Pierce and hurt by her deserved. 

Natasha’s fingertips hesitated on the keyboard.

If she did this, all of her would be there for the world to see. If she did this, she would lose something, she knew it, she just wasn't sure what. ( _I only pretend to know everything, Steve_ ).

No, this was not all of her.

This was not any of her.

This was where she had come from, and that was all. This mattered and it would haunt her footsteps all her life, but  _this_ was her--this woman standing here with red hair forced blade-straight by the spare straightener Sam kept in his bathroom, this woman with Sam squawking and Steve deadpanning and Maria grumbling over her earpiece as they saved the world.

These files, these old names and faces and bloody hands, they were truthful lies. They were all hers to carry but not all hers to claim. Natasha would not be held ransom by the crimes of the people who had held her reins.

And those hands she had bloodied as her own, conscious self? Those she would live with. She had thought she was doing right.

Her eyes flicked up to Pierce. "Are you?" she said, because Natasha, above all else, knew how to be a weapon.

She might be more, might believe Clint’s claims, might answer Steve’s request for a friend, but all Pierce would ever get from her was this. She would cut back at him with his own question, would set up his empire to crumble around him, and would leave him bleeding in the rubble.

_I can bear my secrets. I live every day with this blood on my hands and you never have._

_What do you want me to be for you, Pierce? Cowed, as dirty as you, the pet you all imagine, comfortable with everything so long as I have a smirk and a lie to hide behind--_

_Well, tough luck, buddy, be careful what you wish for._

Natasha had always told the truth. This was her story, her fingers on the keyboard, her choice to damn and condemn and spread her every forgotten secret across the world.

 

After the battle, when Steve asked Natasha to find whatever files she could on the Winter Soldier, she hesitated. 

 _I'm not sending you after your death wish, Steve_ , Natasha thought, but she smiled and nodded. "I'll see what I can do," she said. "Don't get your hopes up."

"He's alive," said Steve. "I didn't save him then. I'll find him now."

_You think that's the red in your ledger, don't you, Cap? You broke HYDRA wide open, you won the war; you didn't kill a downed enemy, you let him go—isn't that enough?_

 

Natasha holed up in her apartment with its view of the patch of sky the Triskelion had once blocked out. She read for days.

She chased herself through lines of data like she had once chased Clint Barton. SHIELD surveillance and gas station video cameras, vague newspaper articles and brutally, clinically precise mission reports she didn’t remember delivering—many of these she had read before. But dumping SHIELD’s files online had also dumped HYDRA’s. It had brought to light things she hadn’t had the clearance for before, that she hadn’t even known were missing.

She watched herself hesitate, a small red figure on bad film, over and over, and knew few of the others following this path of investigation would notice those small moments. She watched targets land blows they shouldn’t have been able to, almost escape (though they never quite did).

She read about other projects, too, soaked up every bit of information she could get her eyes on. HYDRA wasn’t dead; and while she wasn’t planning on joining Fury on his European HYDRA-Smash Tour of 2014 and she wasn't planning on providing Steve with any breadcrumbs about his illusive, deadly ex, Natasha would hardly be surprised if HYDRA went after her. Paying attention was not a luxury she could dispose of.

 

“Tell me you're not in Tahiti.”

“I'm, uh, not. Why? What time is it where you are, geez.”

“4:32 a.m. Just reading some leaked reports and making my own skin crawl. Be safe, Clint,” Natasha said, and hung up on him.

 

At two a.m. on a Wednesday morning, Natasha sat up in the ratty blanket wrapped around her shoulders and paused the video on her laptop.

Natalia Romanova, a few months past sixteen and a few degrees past lethal, stalked down a backstreet of Madrid. There was a shadow flicking along the roofline, right in little Natalia's blind spot.

No, not a shadow—a  _ghost_.

Natasha leaned forward, and let the video play out. Her eyes stayed fixed on the outline of the Winter Soldier slipping over roofs and balconies. She hadn’t thought she'd ever fought him before he shot a nuclear engineer through her on a SHIELD extraction mission.

She kept watching and it began to dawn on her. Little Natalia wasn't checking her blind spot. The Winter Soldier stopped to set up shop on a far rooftop as Natalia started to distract the target, bringing him into easy range. When the Winter Soldier fired, the perfect long-range shot of the Howling Commando's best sniper, the slug tore through Natalia's target.

Natasha, decades removed, so many muddled memories and unmakings since that moment, stared as her youthful self glanced once at the fallen man and then slipped away through the panicking crowd.

She had been right. Before that meeting on a cliff side where he put a bullet through her, she had never fought the Winter Soldier.

She had fought  _with_  him.

Natasha got up and made herself some green tea, then settled back down and scoured the next three years of video, looking for glimpses of dark shadows in the back of her missions, a sniper to complement her bait, a demolitions expert to complement her intimate kills.

She found him, over and over again, and scrubbed at her eyelids. She pulled up what sparse footage of his missions they had captured over the years, the rather more extensive files and reports HYDRA had kept on him. She called up a friend in Kiev and got some deeper hidden secrets from him.

HYDRA and the USSR had traded over the years, red ballerinas and toy soldiers. Natasha thought about the snarling Soldier and his black button eyes, the way he had shot straight through her beside a cliff near Odessa, the way he had gone after her on that freeway and not the big blond super soldier, as though he knew she was the bigger threat, as though he knew the two broken marionettes ought to be pitted against each other.

Natasha thought about Clint not pulling the trigger.

Digging deeper—the sun had risen, some time ago, and was now high and blazing outside her window—digging deeper, she found that some of the helicarrier video surveillance had kept broadcasting even as the ship went down.

She cobbled together footage of the battle in the belly of the third helicarrier. They grappled and slammed each other, Steve only defending. The Winter Soldier shot Steve in the back three times. Steve collapsed but managed to place the chip. She had seen all this—had yelled at him for not finishing the job, the idiot.

The video kept going. The Soldier screamed like a wounded animal and Natasha's toes curled. Steve freed him from the beam holding him down and Natasha cursed him in Russian, in French, in good soldier's English. "He's a weapon, you fossil, a weapon, and he's pointed at you, I know what that's like, he's a weapon, oh god how did you live to be ninety with a death wish like this—”

She watched the Winter Soldier yell his confused rage, slam Steve into metal.

“Finish it,” said Steve, the idiot, the wide-eyed idiot, and Natasha wanted to shake him til his teeth rattled.

She watched Bucky Barnes hesitate above him. The feed went dark.

Natasha sipped her cold tea.

Then she gathered up every file she had collected on Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, and went to see a man about a grave.

 

Natasha kept close attention to the red and black in her ledger. It was a reaction perhaps to so much of her story being out of her clutches. Old entries had been left out, erased, burned away. She would hold onto every one she could, every debt and victory and loss, for the sake of all those she could not remember.

She owed Clint for his clear sight, for his hesitation on the trigger. She owed Steve for his shield, held up again and again to protect her, for carrying her out of the rubble.

She owed them and it mattered, it mattered, why did it matter? She would face down gods and monsters to wipe out that red in her ledger.

These men had saved her life.

Natasha owed them a debt, because that was an act with value, an act with worth. She would make it an act with worth. She would treat it like an act with worth.

She would call it  _red in her ledger_  and she would mean that her life was not expendable.


End file.
